


Words Written in Steam

by just_a_dram



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Jealousy, Love Confessions, Love Triangles, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-22
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-02 07:41:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1054223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/just_a_dram/pseuds/just_a_dram
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The words hang there in the air, thick with steam, exposing Jon’s heart for judgment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words Written in Steam

**Author's Note:**

> This was a response to an anon prompt. I might continue it in a couple more fics. I'm always accepting prompts in my [ask box](http://justadram.tumblr.com/ask). As long as they're for my ships, there's a good chance I'll write it for you...eventually!

There are very few places Jon cares to run into Jaime Lannister, but the steamy bathing rooms of the Moon’s Gate ranks rather high up on the list of unpleasant locales in which to have an exchange. Of course, he has the misfortune of facing the Kingslayer’s toothy grin on a daily basis, ever since he came to the Vale and found Sansa under the vile man’s protection.  _Willingly_ under his protection. He sits at her side at table, leaning in towards her ear to whisper gods know what, walks close enough through the halls that her skirts brush his legs, and can be found in her chambers at all hours of the day and night, no matter when Jon knocks to request entrance. He has wondered more than once whether the Kingslayer knocks or whether he is always expected.

A serving girl moves in the shadows, watching them both, as she goes about her business, replacing towels and checking the flakes of soap that await dirty backs and oily hair. Her eyes light upon Jaime perhaps more frequently than they do Jon, although Jon is more the novelty here in the Vale, whereas Jaime has spent many a moon. The reason is clear enough. It isn’t just his grin that greets Jon today, washing day, the one day chosen out of a fortnight, when the tubs are filled to the brim to wash away the winter’s grime, so that wood might not be wasted to heat the water hot enough to rosy the skin of even the toughest knight. After countless moons spent fighting with no hope of a warm bath to heat his frozen bones, it isn’t a day Jon would generally think to miss, but as he watches the sole surviving Lannister saunter through the room without even a linen towel slung over his hips, he wonders whether he would have been better off skipping his bath today.

The man jostles his shoulder, purposefully plowing into him with muscles tightened, prepared for the blow, as he moves passed. He is nearly twice Jon’s age, but he doesn’t feel it, given how solidly he hits. Jon remembers thinking Jaime Lannister was what a king should look like, when the royal promenade arrived at Winterfell, displacing him from his customary spot, so no offense might be caused by a bastard’s sorry presence. Jaime still looks the kingly part. More so than long faced, solemn Jon Snow ever will, no matter if Daenerys makes him and his children her heir as she’s promised or not.

Yes, Jaime looks the part and feels like a warrior ten years his junior, but such things earn no respect from Jon. Fresh from the bath, when their bodies meet, the Kingslayer’s skin is hot and wet, leaving what feels like a permanent reminder of his presence smeared across Jon’s bicep and chest. It’s an intimacy the serving girl might appreciate, but he’ll have to work hard at with the strong lye soap to scrub away.

He flicks away the beads of water with his hand and turns. “Take care, Kingslayer.” His voice betrays the irritation he feels. It’s loud and sharp in the fuzzy haze of this room, thick with its wet smells and sounds.

“Or what?” the man asks, lazily turning around, his brows arched in amusement. “If you mean to challenge me to a round of naked wrestling, I might have to decline.”

“Wrestling?”

“Well, yes, grappling on the ground like a pair of rutting beasts. Having not had as much practice as you and your men must get up to there at the Wall, it wouldn’t be quite fair, and above all, I am the soul of parity.”

Jon clenches his teeth hard enough that he feels a tug of pain in his right temple. He has wanted to have words with this man since he arrived. Wanted to question Sansa about his presence here too, but he’s done neither, because Sansa makes it clear enough with her benevolent treatment of Jaime Lannister that no one, including the man she once called her  _half_ -brother, should question him. His place is secure, which burns all the more, because Jon was not so certain he would be warmly embraced by Sansa, when he arrived.

“Fairness must be something you prize since you lost your sword hand.”

“A necessity, since losing the best part of me put me on level with your ilk.”

“You’re not my equal in anything, ser.”

Jaime’s smirk grows broader and he places his hands—one live, one not—on his hips, tipping his head down to stare at his feet, as if he works to contain a laugh. “No. Not equals. Dragon spawn or not, you’re still a bastard. I’m a lion. The trueborn son of Tywin Lannister, and the company of men I commanded wasn’t composed of criminals and halfwits.”

“What kind of men were they then, to strike a defenseless maid?” Jon demands, stepping towards Jaime until they’re nearly nose to nose.

Sansa hasn’t told him everything, some things are too painful to recall, but she told him that. If he had been there to stop them, no one would have laid a hand on her. Ever.

Jaime lifts his head, a gleam of defiance brightening his eyes so that they glow almost preternaturally in the gloom of this room. “Ah, yes. They were ungallant, weren’t they? With your sister. Not on my watch exactly, I was busy losing a hand,” he says, lifting the false hand for show, “although I promise to personally make it up to her.”

“You’ll keep your bloody hand off of her,” Jon spits, as he leans into Jaime’s space. Another man,  _most men_  would shift back, for he is the Prince who was promised, but he doesn’t budge. It’s enough to make Jon bare his teeth like Ghost.

“Very well. If the natural one offends you, how about this one?” he asks, rotating his wrist, making the golden hand glint.

Jon shakes his head. “I know exactly what you are.”

As smart as Sansa is—he heard before he arrived of the cleverness of Sansa Stark, how she managed to outsmart Littlefinger himself, and now he’s seen ample proof of her quick wits and sly moves himself—he doesn’t understand why she can’t see through this honorable mummer’s act at which her leonine guard plays.  _I’m taking your sister north. Restore her to her proper place. When the snows melt, we’ll head for Winterfell_.  _It’s where she belongs._  Without question she belongs there. If the snows ever melt, and after who knows how many namedays pass. At which point, how far will the Kingslayer have burrowed his way into Sansa’s favor, her bed, her heart?

Jon would take her to her home. She doesn’t need Jaime Lannister. She can part ways with him and they can go on as if the Lannisters, the architects of their family’s demise, no longer exist. They can be at home together, in the empty halls of Winterfell.

“I’m not surprised you do. You know, I think we’re rather more alike than you’d prefer, aside from the unpleasantness of your birth,” he says, looking down over a nose someone was kind enough to break for him. Shame it didn’t make him as ugly on the outside as Jon knows he must be on the inside. If only Jon came armed to the bath with more than a towel, he might do a better job of permanently rearranging his handsome face. “It’s why you grimace every time you walk through your sister’s chamber’s door to find me at her hearth. I hate to disappoint you though. I have no plans to fight you for the privilege of fucking your sister. She wouldn’t like it.”

Jon doesn’t realize he’s shoved the man, doesn’t feel his arms rise up or the touch of calloused palms on unyielding muscle, until he’s standing there, watching him stumble backward, his feet slipping on the water slicked tiles. Fortune is not with Jon and the Kingslayer rights himself, catching himself like a cat, who flips mid tumble to land on its feet. He might have cracked his head open, but he didn’t and he has the gall to laugh.

“Wouldn’t like it at all,” he says, wagging his head back and forth in a rabid taunt. “She abhors violence. Her game is of a different sort.”

Movement in his peripheral vision draws Jon’s attention. It’s the serving girl stooped partly over with mouth agape. The sight of her makes Jaime’s words writhe like snakes in Jon’s stomach.  _She wouldn’t like it_.

“Leave us. Now,” he says with raised hand, his pointed finger trembling.

“Oh, no, don’t,” Jaime calls to her in a ridiculous sing song. “The girl was enjoying herself. Spoilsport.” He frowns, as the girl complies, skittering from the room on silent feet that will no doubt carry word of this argument to all the servants in Sansa’s household, and what the servants whisper of, soon even the lady will hear tell of. Sansa won’t like it. Which part of it will raise the bile of her stomach? Perchance she’ll hear the Lannister man’s poisonous accusations, and she’ll turn him out. Or she won’t, and Jon will feel the fool, when forced to sit opposite him once again over honey sweetened barley and stewed plums. “You needn’t act so affronted. If anyone knows what it is to lust after a sister’s cunt, it’s me.”

What he means to say is something about Sansa’s honor. About keeping her name out of his filthy mouth, but that isn’t what comes spilling out, insistent and desperate, demanding to be heard and believed. “She’s not my sister.”

“Without question. The flames told you so. I’ve heard,” Jaime says, crossing his arms over his chest and widening his stance to stand feet astride. “I hope that’s a comfort, when you’re hard and alone, thinking of her.”

A flicker of a dream, something that lived on the periphery as he awoke this morning in his bed bleeds to life before his eyes. Rosebud lips. Red hair spilled across white. White snow or white linens, although he never slept on fine bleached linens with Ygritte. And milky legs spread wide with another patch of promising red betwixt them.

Jon steps forward again, gaining the distance he lost in Jaime’s stumble, his hands clenching into tight fists. He doesn’t crave violence, no matter how skilled at it he becomes, it doesn’t light his blood the way it does other men’s, driving them into the arms of women to drain the rest of their heady need, but to break his fingers or bruise his knuckles on the last remaining Lannister’s face would be a distinct pleasure.

“At least Cersei wanted me. The shewolf will never go for it. Too much of a Stark to indulge herself that way. Ned’s girl after all.”

Whatever he says after that, whatever cuts he makes with calm, purring certainty are drowned out by the echo of a voice, feminine and distinctly worried given the timbre, calling out,  _Hello_. It bounces through the corridor and the open door. They both know the voice. It’s Sansa, and Jon has the good sense to move back, putting a stop through forced distance to whatever was about to erupt between them. But the Kingslayer lacks any sense at all and turns towards the sound of her voice as naked as his nameday.

Jon leans down, grabbing up a damp piece of linen crumpled at his feet and tosses it at Jaime, letting it hit him in the back with a wet smack, before issuing his growled warning, “Make yourself decent.”

He’s still loosely tucking it about his waist in no great hurry, when she enters in a sweep of grey skirts, her head held high, her hair trailing over her shoulders, red except for the ends, which are a dyed brown, a remnant of a different time, she told Jon, when one night after too much sour wine, he slipped his palm under the darkened strands and lifted them to the light.

“Oh,” she says, looking away with a quick twist of her head. If their state of near undress has discomposed her, she hides it well enough, however, when she folds her hands before her and clears her throat. “I was made to understand there was some disagreement afoot.”

So the serving girl went directly to her mistress then, doing away with the slower moving chain of castle gossip, and Sansa couldn’t have been too far, otherwise blood would have been spilled before she could stop them, for Jon’s certain in his current state of agitation, he wouldn’t need his sword or a dagger to bloody the Kingslayer. Or at least choke him until his eyes popped.

“No disagreement,” Jaime says, dragging his hand through wet hair. “We were just discussing our man Snow’s being in love with you.”

The words hang there, caught in the humidity, shimmering in their horrible, terrifyingly perverse truth.  _It’s the truth_. He knows it as soon as the words are said, not in the crude terms of cunts and cocks, but love, and as the realization sinks under his flesh, searing its way into his bones never to be leached out, it’s like the world has slowed to half its normal speed. Sansa lifts her head, turning to fix wide blue eyes on him, as bright as the eyes of the undead he sent to their doom with a burning sword. If only someone would similarly dispatch him. Now.

“Perhaps I put too fine a word on it,” Jaime says, and Jon knows he’ll make some repetition of his earlier words if he doesn’t speak.

And so he does. A stumble of no and yes and but, until his face is red and Jaime is rubbing his beard in self congratulation. “We are cousins,” he finishes lamely, his shoulders sinking under the weight of her stare.

“So we are. Or so they say.”

“I think he intended on making you choose.”

When Jaime speaks, her eyes settle on him, her lashes fluttering, looking almost relieved that she need not look upon Jon for the time being. There is a familiarity there that he can’t yet duplicate, though he has known her longer. This man, it would seem, knows her better. They are alike or share some secret knowledge that makes them seem so for the time being. Surely it is temporary. A fleeting condition.

“Choose?” she echoes back.

“Between him and me.”

“A woman given a choice?” she asks, her voice a cool accusation that lacks a clear target. “An easy enough choice, because it is not like that between either of us, is it Ser Jaime?” she asks, coming unfixed from the floor and floating towards them both, until she stops at Jaime’s side and comes no closer, keeping a safe distance between herself and Jon, a distance that feels painfully infinite. “My lord father was as a father to you too, Jon. We share the same brothers and sister. And Ser Jaime is merely doing his duty towards me. You have misunderstood. Both of you.”

Jaime inclines his head, the mirth melting from his face like a heap of snow in the heated tubs, but Jon can’t look away. There is something in her eyes, something he can’t name that holds his gaze, begging to be known, felt, and shared between them. If he knew her better, he might guess it, might grasp at the truth she has hidden away behind an icy mask the steam fails to alter. But he doesn’t, and she must see that, for she sighs, her mouth turning up at the sides in a sad imitation of a smile. He’s disappointed her and he doesn’t even know how.

“You understand, don’t you?”

And as she speaks, the golden hand settles on her back, and Jon fears he never will.

 


End file.
